Bound
by mysticxf
Summary: Jack has a few minutes alone to think while he’s chained to Colleen’s body.


Lost and its characters belong to JJ Abrams, Bad Robot, and The Others. Jack has a few minutes alone to think while he's chained to Colleen's body.

Lost – Bound  
By Mystic  
November 1st 2006

He'd only ever been in handcuffs once before and this time they closed them much tighter. Jack twisted his wrist, feeling the cold metal dig into his skin and he bent when he saw something red fleck off on his arm. He touched the cuffs attached to the gurney, sliding his finger inside the grooves and pulled his finger away, wiping someone else's dried blood off on his jeans.

He pressed his free hand to his head and took a long breath, his mind automatically drifting to Kate. He thought he'd heard her, walking towards this operating room, but he convinced himself it was his mind playing tricks on him, but he couldn't shake the feeling that she was there. Somehow he knew she'd been standing not more than twenty feet from him and while the idea of her condition frightened him, knowing she was there – was alive – calmed him.

Jack wondered how she was doing. His eyes focused on the handcuffs. If they knew about his past, they knew about hers – he was sure of that. Twisting his wrist again, the cold burned at his flesh and he swallowed. Had they put her in handcuffs? Had they taken her to a dark room somewhere? Had they hurt her?

His eyes met the ceiling and he sighed, trying to erase visions of her screaming his name from his mind. Jack could hear her clearly now, as clear as he heard her seventy something days ago in a jungle as rain poured down on him and he hid behind a bush from the thing that chased them. He remembered the eerie silence just after the howl and then her piercing scream broke through the air and he'd closed his eyes, feeling the rain drip off his nose and down his cheeks at the thought that she was dead.

She'd died because he made a crack about better shoes thinking she'd back down.

He tugged on the handcuffs. Kate was a fighter, he told himself. He created a scenario, one he'd seen in his nightmares while he tried to sleep in the corner of his holding cell. She'd worn these cuffs and she'd struggled and it was her blood, but she was ok and she was waiting for him. Jack was a fighter too, she knew that.

Jack glanced at the ground, at the linoleum where blood dotted the tiles just under where the woman's hand might have hung off the gurney. She was dead now, her arms calm at her sides, not far from his. There was nothing he could have done for her; it's what he would tell her parents. What he would tell her husband. The man with the bandage on his nose, a man whose name he didn't know.

He understood that it wouldn't come as any consolation. He could still feel the fear inside him when he saw Juliet come in and tell him she needed his help. But it wasn't Sawyer. It was the blood of a woman who was dying. Something inside of him dropped, waiting for her to say her name, to tell him it was Kate. She'd tried to escape, she'd tried to fight, and she was lying on a table with a bullet in her chest. 

Jack breathed a sigh of relief now, looking up into a camera he knew sat in a corner. He didn't care who was watching. He was glad it was this woman and not her. Jack never even considered what would happen if it ever were Kate. If one day they came to get him to bring him into a room and it was her lying there, blood soaking her clothes.

Juliet stepped into the room, coming to remove the handcuffs, to take him back.

"_What was her name?_"

"_I don't care how you feel._"

"_Who am I here to save?_"

Jack watched the expressions that passed across her face. He watched how malleable she was, how his words could affect her the way hers affected him. Jack wondered if she'd watched him look at Colleen's face, to make his heart stop thumping, to know it wasn't Kate. He wondered if she'd registered something back when she'd first come to him. He was trying so hard not to let her be a bargaining chip. Her or Sawyer.

They took him back to the room, past that place where he could feel his heart tug towards her – where he called out to her quietly, not truly expecting a response – and he went back to the corner, wrapping his arms around his knees as he hung his head against his chest. From the other side of the glass, Juliet might think he was defeated. What she didn't know was his mind raced through ideas. And a part of him somewhere deep inside was confident Kate was somewhere close doing the same.  
-----  
Finis


End file.
